


Buckaroo Banzai Against the Frigid Folio Filcher

by Omorka



Category: Adventures of Buckaroo Banzai Across The 8th Dimension (1984)
Genre: Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2012-12-20
Updated: 2012-12-20
Packaged: 2017-11-21 16:18:44
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings, No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 4,168
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/599728
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Omorka/pseuds/Omorka
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>The Hong Kong Cavaliers take on a library thief with particular tastes - and peculiar equipment.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Buckaroo Banzai Against the Frigid Folio Filcher

**Author's Note:**

  * For [violeteyes](https://archiveofourown.org/users/violeteyes/gifts).



“It’s a _what_?” Reno asked, pausing the videotape on a grainy image of a man dwarfed by the chrome-and-rubber device on his shoulder.

“A cryomorphic energy projector,” Buckaroo repeated. The pencil in his fingers darted across the sketchbook in front of him; he barely looked down, his eyes darting across the screen.

Reno glanced back at New Jersey and shrugged. “Ah, freeze ray,” New Jersey elaborated hastily. Reno nodded, as if that explained everything.

For a few seconds, the only sound was #2 lead against heavy cardstock. Finally, Buckaroo handed the sketchbook across the table. “That’s my best guess from the angle we have,” he said, sounding just slightly disappointed. “Check me.”

“How would I know?” Perfect Tommy complained. “I work with hot stuff. Cold’s not all that interesting, at least not in comparison.” He reached out for the pencil; Buckaroo handed it over. “I mean, it’s not like this thing would have an engine,” Tommy continued, as he added something to the left side of the image. “Looks almost more like a squirt gun than a beam weapon,” he hedged. “You sure this is a turbine and not a pump?”

“No,” Banzai sighed, “but why would a pump have the fans on the back?”

“I don’t know why a beam projector would need the fans, either,” Tommy argued, but he handed the pad and the pencil back. “But if that’s what it is, it needs a connector the to battery pack he’s wearing around his waist.”

Buckaroo blinked and peered at the screen, then at the correction. “You’re right,” he agreed, “those are batteries, not grenades. This guy’s pretty confident.”

“With good reason!” their guest burst out. “He managed to take out half of campus security and hold up the entire Princeton library with that thing!” His voice dropped back to normal levels as he went on, “And the stuff he took from special collections can’t be replaced. Is there anything you can do for us?”

Buckaroo tapped the pencil against the drawing twice. “It’ll have to count as my alumni donation for the year,” he stated, and held out one hand.

The university president grabbed it and shook it thankfully. “We’ll name a walkway after you,” he blurted. “Just - get us those books back!”

\---

Billy held up a stack of fanfold printer paper several sheets thick. “I’m not seeing any particular patterns in what was stolen,” he stated. “No common authors, no common time period except for all being over 80 years old, no common themes.”

“Any clumps?” Buckaroo asked. “Groups of authors that knew each other, or overlapping topics?”

“There’s a group of early 18th century manuscripts that are all on genealogy,” Billy said, flipping to one of the later pages, “but other than that, it’s all over the map. Music, poetry, natural philosophy, and astronomy.” He set the stack down on the table and folded his arms. “The only real commonality I’ve found so far is that there’s no pure mathematics and no supernatural stuff.”

Perfect Tommy butted in, “What do you mean, supernatural stuff?”

“No occultism,” Billy replied. “No astrology, no spiritualism, no religion. Only one work with much mythology, and that was mostly astronomical writing - explanations of the names of the constellations.”

“So, we have a rationalist with a freeze ray?” Reno asked.

Buckaroo nodded. “A man of literature and science, at least.” He frowned, and continued, “But that doesn’t give us much to go on, either for IDing our thief or for predicting his movements.”

“I already put out an alert for the stolen items to all the antique books auctioneers,” Reno offered, “so if he’s trying to sell them, he’ll have pretty limited opportunities.”

“He doesn’t strike me as the type to be out to make a profit,” Buckaroo mused, setting their schematic of the cryo-ray on an easel and studying it. “A man out for money would have used a cheaper weapon.”

“Maybe he wanted to make sure he didn’t hurt the books,” said a female voice from the door. Buckaroo turned and smiled softly as Penny entered the room; she returned the grin and added, “I mean, bullets make holes, so do explosives, fire burns, sonics might destroy the bindings - stun rays and freeze rays would be the way to go.”

Perfect Tommy and New Jersey exchanged a look, eyebrows raised. “Sure, makes sense,” Tommy admitted. “At least, if we’re right about it being an energy projector and not a supercooled water pistol.”

Penny settled onto an extra desk chair and studied the diagram. “There’s no insulated tank for a supercooled solution,” she declared. “Besides, the freezer he’d need to keep it cool would use more power than the pumps would - that battery pack wouldn’t cut it.”

“Unless he has super-efficient energy cells as well,” Perfect Tommy argued. “I mean, he built a freeze ray.”

Buckaroo nodded. “I don’t think we can count that out yet,” he stated, “but I also don’t think the visual is consistent with a supercooled stream.”

Penny leaned in closer to the diagram. “Hey,” she blurted, “are you guys sure about those fins?”

“Might have the angles wrong,” Tommy conceded. “Other than that, yeah, pretty sure.”

“Then it doesn’t project cold at all,” Penny announced.

There was a long pause. Finally, New Jersey took the bait. “Then what does it do?”

“It sucks heat!” she shouted triumphantly. “Look, see, it selects a target and then uses the entropic grid at the front to pull the thermal energy out. The fins are for radiating away the heat that the battery pack can’t store as electricity. It’s easy!”

“I wouldn’t call that easy,” Perfect Tommy started, then paused as he re-considered. “But that might be doable. Let me see if the Professor and I can mock up a model for that.” He headed for the door.

“Let me know if you get anywhere on that,” Buckaroo agreed, then picked up Billy’s printout. His eyes darted across the pages. “You’ve run a search for commonalities between all of these authors?”

“Yup, but other than all but three of them being male, I haven’t come up with much,” Billy admitted.

Buckaroo tossed him the stack. “You said no religious writings. Maybe we have a collector of early freethinker’s work.”

“I didn’t look up religion,” Billy chastised himself. “I’ll get right on it.” He dropped into his chair, his fingers clicking on the keyboard before he was even fully seated.

New Jersey eased into the overstuffed chair next to Penny. “Pretty good work,” he observed.

“Not bad for a girl, huh?” She raised her chin, her eyes bright as she met his gaze evenly.

“No, no,” New Jersey demurred, “I didn’t mean that at all. More like, ah -”

Her gaze dropped. “More like, not bad for a college dropout?”

“I wasn’t going to say that, either,” he replied, “but I’ll admit the thought might have crossed my mind, a bit.”

Penny frowned; the crease in her forehead looked almost unnatural. “Yeah, I don’t remember having taken a lot of sciency stuff at Montana State, either,” she mumbled. “But really, a lot of that part of my life is a blur. I don’t know how I know half the stuff I know.”

Buckaroo’s hand came down gently on her shoulder. “That’s not important,” he said, each word emphasized. “You’re a contributing member of the team, Penny, and you catch a lot of what we miss - how you do it doesn’t have anything to do with your worth.”

Billy shouted across the room, “Hey, I got a hit! It’s not 100%, Buckaroo, nowhere near, but a solid majority of the stolen authors were either practicing Quakers or raised Quaker.”

New Jersey’s eyebrows rose. “Really? Princeton’s sort-of-not-really a Presbyterian school, isn’t it? I wouldn’t have guessed they’d have that many.”

Buckaroo leaned against the back of Penny’s chair and closed his eyes. “Definitely unusual. So if our book collector wants to continue in that vein, where would he go next?”

Billy’s hands flew across the keyboard. “Let me pull up a school database . . . the closest school with a large Quaker contingent in its library would be Swarthmore, it looks like.”

Buckaroo’s eyes opened. “Not too far. Let’s see if Professor Hikita made heads or tails out of Tommy’s description and then head over.”

\---

“Thanks,” the librarian said, accepting a cup of hot coffee from Mrs. Johnson as Perfect Tommy draped his jacket around her shoulders.

“I can’t believe we missed him,” New Jersey groaned.

“By less than an hour, even,” Reno added.

Buckaroo shook his head. “We have a lead, now, though,” he stated.

Perfect Tommy looked up, surprised. “We do?”

“The anti-heat-ray has to continuously radiate the thermal energy it absorbs,” Buckaroo explained. “We saw that with Professor Hikita’s model. So any infrared scan of the area should pick it up.”

Reno blinked. “Do we have an infrared scanner on the Jet Car?” 

“We do,” Buckaroo said, nodding, “but I suspect an arial approach would make more sense. I’m calling in Blue Blaze Irregulars Casper & Scooter Lindley for assistance.” He slipped his Go-phone out of his pocket and began dialing.

“He just wants to ride in the helicopter again,” Reno grumbled.

Perfect Tommy shrugged. “What the boss wants, the boss gets. I’m going to go see if they’ve gotten the furnace up and running yet.”

\---

“That’s it,” Buckaroo shouted over the noise of the helicopter rotor. “Bear left.”

Reno pressed the headset against his ear. “They’re going left,” he reported to Pinky; Carruthers yanked the wheel and screeched through the next intersection at fifteen miles over the speed limit.

New Jersey’s head popped up from behind a badly-unfolded map. “There’s nothing up that way except houses.” His nose nearly brushed the paper as Pinky slammed on the brakes to avoid a motorhome. “Old ones, from the looks of it,” he finished.

A burst of static interrupted Buckaroo’s voice in the headset. Reno growled a half-coherent profanity, followed by “Come again, boss, over?”

“The infrared source is slowing down,” Buckaroo repeated. “I thinks he realizes he’s being followed.”

“It ain’t like the helicopter is exactly stealthy,” Reno pointed out.

There was a pause, followed by Buckaroo’s instructions again. “Over the hill, then curve to the right - whoa!”

“You okay, Buckaroo?” Reno shouted. Pinky’s eyes widened; he reached for the gear shift, urging the unmarked white van to even greater speeds.

“We’re being fired at,” Buckaroo reported. “It would be nice if we’d been able to come up with a countermeasure to the anti-heat-ray.”

“Don’t look at me,” Perfect Tommy grumbled as Reno relayed the message. “I think we did pretty well for only having half an hour and a pencil diagram.”

A high-pitched ringing stung Reno’s ear; he half-yanked the headset off before he caught himself. As he slammed it back on, he heard Casper shouting “We’re hit, we’re hit!” in the background. “How bad is it?” he demanded.

“We haven’t lost structural integrity,” Buckaroo said rapidly, “but the rotors aren’t meant for sub-arctic chill - we’re going to have to land her.” There was a pause as he exchanged words with Lindley. “There’s what looks like a golf course just to the left,” he continued. “Pick us up there.”

New Jersey looked confused. “There’s no golf course on the map.”

“A park, then?” Pinky called over the engine’s protests. “Private reserve?”

“There’s a forty-acre private estate with a small lake,” New Jersey said, flipping the map around. “You want Kelvin Court, if that’s where we’re going.”

Reno looked out the window at the signs flashing by. “That was Olszewski Avenue just there.”

“Five blocks, well, they’re not blocks exactly - five intersections, then left on Kelvin,” New Jersey stated.

“Got it.” Pinky coaxed the motor down a gear as the slope of the road increased.

Reno crouched involuntarily as the same ringing nearly split his eardrum. “Status!” he barked as confused gabbling flooded the receiver.

“Direct hit!” Buckaroo shouted. “The good news is that they got the engine, not the rotor - but we need to land her, _now_ , before we can’t.” There was more garbled chatter, then a question: “Do you have visual on us yet?”

Reno pressed his face to the window. “Yeah, at ten o’clock and coming down fast.” The front window of the chopper was completely frosted - Lindley was flying blind, or nearly so. “You’ll be at the tree line in three, two, one, brace!” The helicopter disappeared in the dense foliage. There was not a horrible crash immediately afterwards, which Reno found encouraging. “You saw that, right, Pinky?”

“I saw it.” Pinky blew through another intersection. “No smoke yet. Good sign, or just too cold to burn?”

“Probably a good sign,” Perfect Tommy said, “but let’s not take chances.”

“Right.” Pinky veered hard to the left and braked; the van skidded to a stop next to a trail of freshly broken tree branches. Perfect Tommy had barely gotten the door open when Buckaroo and Casper came limping out of the underbrush; he reached out to yank them in.

“Easy,” Buckaroo urged, pushing Casper ahead of him. “We’ve got an injury.”

Reno winced. “Hurt in the crash?”

“Naw,” Casper said, a hint of pride in his voice. “I brought her down smooth. Clean the brush out of her and she’ll be good as new.”

Buckaroo glanced at New Jersey. “Frostbite. He took a beam to the knee. See what you can do.” As New Jersey crouched next to their pilot, Buckaroo edged up behind the driver’s seat. “We want the big ugly Victorian at the top of the rise,” he said, pointing in the direction they’d been headed.

“There a back way in?” Pinky asked. “ ‘Cause that’ll be just as bad on our engine as it was the chopper’s. Or worse, the tires.”

“You’ve got tree cover right up to the driveway,” Buckaroo assured him. “After that, we’ll go on foot.”

\---

They’d left New Jersey with Casper in the van. Pinky, Perfect Tommy, Reno, and Buckaroo approached the rickety mansion spread out in an uneven V-formation, keeping the old oaks between them and its many windows.

“We’re about to run out of tree cover,” Perfect Tommy whispered. “Do we want to make a break for it?”

“If we’re lucky,” Pinky observed, “They’ll be expecting us to come from where the copter went down.”

Buckaroo thought deeply for a moment, his eyes unfocused. “I think our best option is to flank them,” he finally said. “The doors will be locked, but they can’t really protect all the windows. We’ll take the sides. Reno, with me; Perfect Tommy, you take Pinky around to the east. I’ll signal on the Go-phone when we’re in position.”

As they crept around the edge of the tree line, Perfect Tommy whispered, “Remember, a beam weapon always shoots in straight lines -”

“So never let there be a straight line between you, me, and the house, I got it,” Pinky murmured. “Looks like there’s even some cover on this side. Not much, though.”

Perfect Tommy surveyed the yard ahead of them. “Looks like our guy collects sculpture, too. Classical reproductions, mostly.” He glanced at the mini-phone in his hand. “Hope they’ve got some on their end.”

The light on the phone blinked twice. Tommy shoved it in his pocket; as one, they took a deep breath and charged, zig-zagging their way across the lawn.

The first shot missed them both by yards and instantly freeze-dried a square yard of grass. Pinky dove for the nearest sculpture, a statue of a centaur with his cheeks puffed out; this time the beam was nearly good, and the horse half of the bronze figure was suddenly rimed with frost. Tommy took the opportunity to make a break for the next statue; the searing high ring of the beam sounded, but not aimed at them.

“He’s only got one!” Pinky puffed, as he dove under a bench. “He’s having to split his fire between us and Buckaroo’s team!”

“Good thing, too,” Perfect Tommy called back as the beam sliced through the space he’d just been in; he picked himself up from a crouch and barreled towards a huge bay window. The next shot was on the other side again; he took a flying leap and tucked his head, hitting the leaded glass shoulder-first. A hardwood floor came at him at an odd angle, but he rolled with it, shrugging off the shards.

The next zing was accompanied by a shout. Tommy jumped to his feet and grabbed Pinky as he flopped halfway through the hole in the window, easing him over the remaining glass. “They got you?” he asked.

“Just a graze,” Pinky gasped. Ice crystals frosted his left shoulder and part of his arm. “I’ll be fine.”

Perfect Tommy glanced around the room. “Here,” he ordered, “put this on.” He grabbed a moth-eaten woolen afghan off of an uncomfortable-looking sofa in dark wood and olive-green upholstery.

“This place is a dump,” Pinky observed as they wrapped his useless shoulder. He wasn’t wrong; the place was furnished in antiques, but very poorly kept ones. Varnish flaked and peeled from hickory and cherrywood, stuffing peeked through holes in upholstery, and everything was covered with a thick layer of dust.

Perfect Tommy tied the ends of the afghan in a knot behind Pinky’s neck. “Let’s not worry about the decor until we’ve nabbed our mad scientist,” he said, turning towards the door and drawing his firearm.

More than a dump, it was a maze. Every door seemed to open onto a narrow hallway that went nowhere. The few that did lead somewhere all seemed to head back to the kitchen. They’d just arrived there for the third time when Buckaroo and Reno got there for their first.

“This is ridiculous,” Pinky grumbled. “Where’s our perp? Why hasn’t he come after us with the portable freeze-ray yet?”

“Maybe there’s only the one,” Reno suggested, “and he had to suit it back up when he stopped firing out of the gable.”

Buckaroo’s eyes scanned the room. “Maybe we don’t need to find him,” he mused. “Maybe we just need to find the stolen books, and he’ll come to us.”

“We hit the library already,” Perfect Tommy protested. “They’re not in there; we checked.”

Pinky blinked. “So where would you hide the stuff you stole with a heat-stealing ray?”

After a pause for a breath, four voices said as one: “The freezer!” Buckaroo spun on his heel and grabbed at the handle of the chest freezer next to the fridge and tugged.

“Very clever,” said a voice behind them. Slowly, the pantry door swung open; a tall figure dressed in a dusty black suit and carrying a ridiculous assembly of tubes, fans, and turbines on his shoulders stepped out. Behind them, they could see the back of the pantry rotated aside to reveal a hidden staircase.

Buckaroo studied their host’s features; he had the long face and watery eyes of a certain type of New England aristocracy. He was neither particularly young nor particularly old, and he seemed weary more than angry.

“You can’t keep these,” Buckaroo said, glancing down into the freezer, where the books and papers from the two university libraries - and perhaps a few private ones besides - were stacked nearly to the lid. It wasn’t a conventional freezer, at least on the inside; a prickle of static raised the hairs on his arm as he felt the temperature and humidity both drop.

“At the moment, you are not in any position to tell me what I can and cannot do,” observed their host. “Unless you are officers of the law with a warrant, at the moment you are trespassing on my property.”

Perfect Tommy sneered, “You don’t watch TV? You’ve got to know that everyone in the Banzai Institute is deputized in 30 states.”

Their captor blinked. “There isn’t a television in this house, and there never has been. There never will be, if I have anything to say about it.”

“Of course,” Banzai breathed. “I should have seen it before. You’re not even going to read them, are you?”

“What?” The man with the freeze ray seemed confused.

“You’re mad about preservation,” Buckaroo continued, “but only of the things that meet your standards, either esthetic or scientific. Things of the body and mind, but not the heart or the spirit.” He gestured with both hands at the house around them. “It’s too much for you to take care of even just all this, so you came up with a way to preserve the fragile things forever. But they can’t ever be used. Once they’re frozen, thawing them would damage them.”

Their host frowned and tightened his grip on the vaguely nozzle-like portion of the device. “Not necessarily. They can be thawed very slowly and carefully, to avoid structural damage from growing and shrinking ice crystals.”

“But only once or twice,” Buckaroo continued.

“Better that, than lose them forever!” the scientist exploded. “I’m doing the world an immense service, collecting the thoughts of those unpolluted by conventional religion and cheap sentimentality and keeping them safe! And I will continue to do so, until they’re all safe!”

Reno laughed once, a short bark. “That’s crap and you know it. If that were what you wanted, you’d have developed the technique and then offered it to the various libraries free of charge.”

“Or at least put it up on the open market for sale,” Perfect Tommy added. “Instead, you decided you’d be the arbiter of what got saved and what didn’t - and took it by force.”

“They’d use it on the undeserving,” their host grumbled. “I couldn’t bear to have my precious process used on tawdry novels, the ramblings of women, and the thunderous babblers of the pulpits.”

Precious Tommy looked offended. “Hey, some chicks have written some really cool stuff. Check it out sometime.”

For a moment, their captor was caught short; whatever he’d expected them to say, it wasn’t that. Without changing the angle of his arm, Buckaroo flipped the pistol in his hand and fired a single shot.

Their host grinned horribly. “You missed.” He brought the nozzle around to bear. “My turn,” he announced with a smirk as he twisted a cuff at the back of the nozzle.

For an instant, the high-pitched ringing filled the kitchen - and then it dissolved into an equally loud hiss. A cloud of vapor rose from the back of the device; the host shrieked and began trying to struggle out of the contraption. Perfect Tommy checked Buckaroo; at the nod from his boss, he darted forward and began helping the madman with his buckles. Up close, he could see that a single hose now had a clean bullet hole through it - and a single bottle of Perrier on the shelf behind had shattered, dripping mineral water directly onto the hot vanes on the back of the freeze ray.

“This’d be easier,” he panted, “if you weren’t wearing a wool suit.”

The freeze ray clattered to the floor in a cloud of vapor as Perfect Tommy pinned the mad scientist’s hands behind his back. The man looked older now, as he looked at Buckaroo. “What are you going to do to me?” he asked, mournfully.

“The usual,” Buckaroo said, shrugging. “Return your stolen goods to their rightful owners, make sure you don’t have either the means or the plans to reconstruct your weapons, go through your plans to see what else you’ve got in the pipeline, and see if we can get you some help.”

The man blinked. “Help? What help do you think I need?” he bristled.

“A TV, for one thing,” Pinky answered as Perfect Tommy led him to the door.

\---

“I can’t thank you enough,” the university president said. “We’ll get to work on the Banzai Commemorative Pathway as soon as we can raise some construction funds.”

“Don’t worry about it,” Buckaroo said with a wave as he watched the student workers unloading the boxes of documents. “Just let them know to be careful, okay? He hadn’t really worked out the thawing process in much detail. He needed a much lower initial humidity for it to really be safe, especially for the older, thicker paper types.”

The president took a handkerchief from his back pocket and mopped his brow. “And Swarthmore sends their thanks, as well.” He adjusted his glasses and watched the students transferring each book to a cart with gloved hands. “So, what was his motive? Was there a hidden code in the documents? Something esoteric he was searching for?”

“No,” Buckaroo said, “he was just in it for the cold cache.”

Reno winced and went to help the students. “Was that intentional?” he whispered to Perfect Tommy, who apparently had the same idea.

“Who knows,” Tommy answered, glancing back at Pinky and Casper, up and about again but still under New Jersey’s watchful eye. “Just be glad no one’s told you to have an ice day yet.”

“Shut up and give me a hand,” Reno grumbled, grabbing another library cart.


End file.
